InteliSpark client, Senseion Therapeutics, Inc., advances to Phase II of their SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) project, winning nearly $1 million from the National Institutes of Health to build on their work conducted in Phase I of the project in developing a new therapeutic for the treatment and prevention of Type 2 diabetes.
According to the Centers of Disease Control, 34.2 million Americans are living with diabetes, of which 90-95% have type 2 diabetes. The medical costs and loss of work and wages for patients with diabetes total $327 billion yearly. Diabetes can lead to serious health outcomes including adverse cardiovascular events.
Prior to phase I, researchers discovered a signaling pathway that regulates both insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion and identified a small molecule modulator that appears to normalize both glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. They believed that by modulating the signaling, they could develop new drugs to treat the disease.
In phase I, researchers tested the feasibility of this treatment in the lab. In phase II, Dr. Daniel Lerner, CEO of Senseion Therapeutics, will co-lead the project with Dr. Rajan Sah, Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, to examine the therapeutic tractability of the modulators for the treatment of patients with Type 2 diabetes and its impact on cardiovascular parameters. Drug development efforts in phase II will expand their understanding of this novel therapeutic to be able to do clinical trials. They plan to submit an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the FDA in in the beginning of 2023.